Willamette Week, We've Gone Klezmer Crazy! >>
Abe Schwartz stepped off the boat in 1899. By 1917, Schwartz, who learned fiddle from Bucharest Gypsies before heading for Ellis Island, was scouting Jewish talent for Columbia Records. His work as a player, tout and conductor helped define klezmer, a balls-out alchemy of Eastern European, Mediterranean and American music. The Klezmer King is part of a recent spate of archival releases documenting klezmer's first Golden Age, from the earliest days of the recording industry through the early '50s. By the standards of 1922 or 2002, King reigns, spitshine clear despite the rudimentary recording equipment used. Ranging from 1917 to 1935, the collection tracks klezmer's journey from obscure ghetto music to a dance genre with a broad American appeal. Oy, fancy that. Following that rise, klezmer was prematurely autopsied around midcentury. But the evolution Schwartz helped start continues through artists like France's Les Yeux Noirs (The Black Eyes). Balamouk, an album as sultry and forlorn as the Left Bank in August, even echoes Schwartz's own career, mingling Gypsy folk with emphatic, Gallic-accented klezmer, hinting at romantic new directions for the music's 21st-century incarnation. If Klezmer King and Balamouk work like the first and last chapters of a history book, Frank London (who's done time with both Klezmatics and Hasidic New Wave) rips out the pages, cuts them up and pastes them back together, William Burroughs style. Brotherhood of Brass intercuts pre-, post- and classic klezmer music from the Balkans, Argentina and beyond into a blazing uprising of flame-bright horns.
Zach Dundas 06/05/02 >> go there
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